KOrea Game Industry Agency. Digital bar flies: Pub where everybody knows your game. IAMA Cognitive Science Professor doing research on StarCraft 2 expertise, AMA : starcraft. Starcraft 2 Science: Skillcraft's Study. Media Technologies and Learning in StarCraft eSport Community. Yong Ming Kow, National University of SingaporeTimothy Young, University of California, Irvine How would you go about finding information on the Internet? Like many others, I may visit a wiki site or an online forum. But in an online video game StarCraft, this is not always the case, especially among the expert players. Instead, they group with the other experts in private chat channels and private forums to discuss deep issues—issues hidden away from a majority of the players.
I performed an ethnographic study in the online real-time strategy game StarCraft. “Sometimes I read wikis, but never the forums. Novice players tend to learn from wikis and online forums, but the experienced players do not always do so. In StarCraft, a small subset of players specialize in producing maps that other players can play. “I remember some people [in the online forums] who always ignored people’s advices and even sometimes claimed they were better than the more experienced people. Starcraft 2 Science: Skillcraft Results. Starcraft 2 Science: Skillcraft Results.
Study Predicts Which StarCraft Race Will Conquer Space | Game|Life. Will it be Zerg? Terran? Protoss? For the last 15 years, the three races of the perennially popular science fiction strategy game StarCraft have waged war across the Koprulu Sector on the outskirts of the Milky Way galaxy. Their armies have been painstakingly balanced against each other by the game’s developer Blizzard to ensure that fans could battle online forever with no race gaining a clear advantage. However, a pair of researchers at the Royal Observatory of Edinburgh took it upon themselves to find out which race would ultimately triumph if given enough time.
Thomas Targett and Duncan Forgan observed competitive StarCraft II matches, then dropped the collected data into statistical models. “Our project is an example of ‘percolation modelling’,” said Thomas Targett in an email. Then they measured the probability of success based on each race adopting each strategy. Mimi Ito - Statics: Amateur Media Production in a Networked Ecology. Among the research communities I frequent, attention to the amateur space is growing but is still relatively sparse. We've spent a tremendous amount of time, for obvious and very good reasons, looking at professional cultural and knowledge production and the technical systems that support it. These are high stakes domains of commercial production. On the other side of the divide, particularly among anthropologists and sociologists, we've been interested in everyday communication, practice, and social networks that are widespread in our culture.
Amateur media production has fallen between the gaps between these two research areas. But nowadays, amateur media is difficult to ignore. My sense is that we're somewhere near the end of the beginning and the beginning of the middle of this big shift which is reordering this balance of power between amateur and professional media. Case 1: Jonathan Coulton The first story I want to tell is of the uptake of a particular song by Jonathan Coulton.
Developing virtual worlds: The interplay of design, communities and rationality | Tschang. Starcraft as a Citizen Science Tool | Well-Bred Insolence. In a similar vein to last week’s post, I’m proud to show you results from an outreach project I’ve been working on with Tom Targett at the ROE for the last few months. As the result of a rather long-winded discussion of interstellar colonisation at coffee time, we got to thinking about how rigorously we could simulate conflict between competing civilisations. Of course, we don’t have any evidence that other civilisations even exist, let alone fight each other for resources. All we know is that conflict has been an important part of human history since time immemorial, and that we can see the origins of our penchant for tribalism and warfare in our primate cousins. The D Day landings. Via ww2incolor.com This still left us with a bit of a problem – how can you model interstellar conflict when you know nothing about the combatants?
We looked at i) by searching for a Nash Equilibrium. A snapshot of the simulation. But is this still true if you place the species in interstellar space? The Geek-Boy Irony Behind Mark Zuckerberg’s Tech Lobby ⚙ Co. It is striking to see the efforts of Mark Zuckerberg and his other lobbying friends juxtaposed with the grim job market that even many college graduates are facing today. Today's young people are the most educated generation ever with the highest levels of college attainment this country has ever seen. Why is it then that hot Silicon Valley corporations are struggling to fill attractive jobs? Code.org, the high-profile industry effort to push for more computer science and programming in K-12 education, correctly highlights the growing need for programmers and the dearth of educational opportunities to learn to code. But the reasons for the high tech talent gap run deeper than a simple lack of curricular offerings.
The statistics on the code.org site are silent as to issues of diversity and equity, and fail to point out that coders are overwhelmingly white, Asian, and male. Even without explicit discrimination, we see women and non-Asian minorities absent from even entry-level tech jobs. SC Dojo. GosuCoaching.com | Gaming's Homepage. Alternate Reality The history of massively multiplayer online games. By Steven L. Kent | Sept. 23, 2003 MMO: Massively Multiplayer Online MMOG: Massively Multiplayer Online Game MMOPW: Massively Multiplayer Online Persistent World MMORPG: Massively Multiplayer Role-Playing Game Until somebody standardizes the acronyms referring to games such as EverQuest, Star Wars Galaxies, and Dark Age of Camelot, the history of this, the fastest growing sector of gaming, will remain fodder for debate.
There seems to be general agreement that MMOGs (for the sake of this article, we will call them "massively multiplayer online games") grew out of MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons). In 1978, Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle completed MUD1, which ran on a PDP-10. (For a closer look at the genesis of the original MUD, check out our Smartest Moments In Gaming History: #19 or this interview with the creators. Raph Koster's impressive website also contains some background on what happened next.) The Elements of MMOG. Columns Index. Welcome to GameSpy's column index! We're committed to bringing you regular gaming commentary that's as substantive as it is entertaining, with GameSpy's crack team of editorial contributors reflecting on a variety of relevant topics. You'll find all of it collected here, so you won't miss a word.
Filled with sprawling worlds ripe for discovery, teeming with thousands of new people to meet, and capable of sucking up entire months' worth of playtime, massively multiplayer online roleplaying games offer one of the modern world's most extreme forms of escapism. Join GameSpy columnist Leif Johnson as he turns a critical eye on the biggest and best of today's MMORPGs, and quests for the virtual worlds most worthy of your time. - A Rift of One's Own - A New Hope - The Soul of WoW Patch 4.3 - So What If Star Wars: The Old Republic is a World of Warcraft Clone?
- Mind Over Chatter in The Secret World - Will a Group-Finder Tool Help or Hurt the Community of Star Wars: The Old Republic? Shooters. Interesting series of articles on MMORPG's - Game-Master.Net. Analysis: Retirees in South Korea find it's no country for old men. July 23, 2012|Christine Kim | Reuters SEOUL (Reuters) - In South Korea, where the average retirement age is a relatively young 58, the golden years are often filled with hard work in coffee shops and small stores that barely provide a living.
More than half of the country's 7.1 million baby boomers -- born from 1955 through 1963 -- had made no financial preparations for retirement, a survey conducted by the country's welfare ministry found. Many of them try to support themselves by opening small businesses on borrowed money. The result is a surge of heavily indebted, self-employed seniors who are at risk of defaulting on debts that average 68.95 million won ($60,400) per household for those in their 50s. It's an ominous sign for a country whose population is ageing faster than any other developed nation. People 50 and older represented 54 percent of South Korea's self-employed last year, up from 47 percent in 2008.
"The economy is never going to get better," said Oh. Jay Wilson: We'd Turn Off Diablo III's Auction House If We Could. Speaking at his GDC panel entitled Shout at the Devil: The Making of Diablo III, former game director Jay Wilson came out and said it: the controversial Real-Money Auction House hasn't panned out the way Blizzard thought it would, and they'd probably pull the plug if it were an easy thing to do. Even though Wilson believes the RMAH has accomplished the goal of reducing account fraud (third-party Diablo 2 item trading sites frequently stole passwords and credit card information), and asserts that there is plenty of evidence to suggest that many people do want it based on the number of transactions happening daily, Wilson now freely admits it was "the wrong solution" to the problems Blizzard was trying to solve.
"It's not good for a game like Diablo. It doesn't feel good to get items for money, it feels good to get items by killing monsters," he said, echoing the complaints of a vocal group of fans. In hindsight, maybe this wasn't the best idea. The Office : Second Life is the same. Becoming a DotA 2 Pro, my Experience and Thoughts. When Korea's E-Sports was at the Brink of Death. Dear Korean, I heard there was a huge scandal regarding E-sports about 2-3 years ago. From what I've heard, the scale of the scandal was so big that it almost put an end to the E-Sports itself. Would you be willing to explain what exactly happened back then?
How did the Koreans react to the scandal? Avid gamer It has been more than three years since the Korean wrote the post about the popularity of Starcraft in Korea. Incredibly, it is still one of the most frequently read posts of this blog. First, a quick review on how Starcraft became a professional sport in Korea. Korea, however, recognized the potential of the Internet early on, and began a massive public investment in installing a fiber-optic cable network throughout the country.
(The lesson: government is good, and it should be in the business of picking winners and losers. Starcraft began becoming professional around 2000. For the next several years, the popularity of professional Starcraft leagues would grow exponentially. Why is StarCraft Popular in Korea? Dear Korean, What caused Starcraft's popularity in Korea? Cristiano E. What's with Korean people and their obsession with Starcraft? Every Korean I know or met loves Starcraft.
Sam Why are Korean people so infatuated with Starcraft? Brian/Starcraft fan How popular are pro-Starcraft players over there, really? Lance Dear Questioners, It is unquestionable that StarCraft is extremely popular in Korea more so than any other country. Terran is victorious. But the popularity of StarCraft in Korea far exceeds just the number of copies sold.
Im Yo-Hwan, one of the top pro gamers in Korea A video game that engendered an entire industry is simply unheard of prior to StarCraft. Pro Leagues and TV Stations The most recent development would be the establishment of pro gaming leagues and cable televisions. For an equivalent American phenomenon, think Avatar. This type of scenes, where CGI and regular actors interact, was the vast majority in District 9, but less than 10 percent of Avatar The PC Bang Phenomenon.